Leaning into hope: Pancreatic cancer survivor grateful for clinical trial
At 55 years old, Kim Charlton shifted in her seat beside her husband on a long flight across the Atlantic Ocean. A successful entrepreneur and mother of three, she was on her way to Spain, where she and her husband planned to build their dream home and retire.
As she anticipated a new chapter in life, Kim looked forward to selling her content marketing business and embracing the possibilities ahead.
Noticing her restlessness, Kim’s husband asked why she was fidgeting so much. She assured him she was fine—just a dull ache in her back. She would feel better after they landed, and she walked around a little. But Kim’s discomfort continued after they returned home to the United States, and her husband insisted she make a doctor’s appointment.
“I only went to appease him,” Kim says. “I was tired of him asking me, ‘Did you call the doctor today?’”
Kim cared deeply about her health. She exercised, prioritized her sleep, ate a plant-based diet, and managed her stress with yoga and meditation. She chalked up the chronic ache to simply getting older.
When an MRI of Kim’s lower back revealed a tumor on her pancreas in November 2023, she was shocked. Doctors diagnosed her with pancreatic cancer, a type of cancer that is not well understood, frequently goes undetected, and is on the rise among people under the age of 65. Kim received the news the same week she sold her business, a turn of events that she found both devastating and a blessing as she could now focus solely on her health.
Within days of her diagnosis, Kim had her first appointment with medical oncologist Putao Cen, MD, and surgical oncologist Curtis J. Wray, MD, MS, at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, who spearheaded a multidisciplinary team of specialists to collaborate on her treatment.
Wray helped Kim enroll in a clinical trial led by Nirav C. Thosani, MD, MHA, Director of the Center for Interventional Gastroenterology at McGovern Medical School. Thosani is a pioneer in endoscopic ultrasound-guided radiofrequency ablation (EUS-RFA), a minimally invasive procedure that uses radio waves to precisely target and heat tumor cells from the inside out, causing them to die.
His clinical trial explores the combination of EUS-RFA with traditional chemotherapy to shrink and destroy pancreatic tumors. “It wasn’t a siloed experience like a lot of health care is today,” Kim says. “They cross-coordinated and worked together.”
Early results of the trial are promising, but the real breakthrough may lie in the immune response that EUS-RFA appears to trigger. As the tumor cells die, they appear to release antigens that prompt the immune system to recognize and attack other cancer cells, including at metastatic sites, helping the body fight cancer more effectively.
Early philanthropic support from Carolyn Frost Keenan and the Atilla Ertan, MD, Chair in Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition, held by Thosani, contributed to the advancement of this study. With additional funding, Thosani hopes to expand studies to investigate EUS-RFA in combination with immunotherapy to further harness the body’s natural defenses against cancer. He says the treatment may also be effective for other gastrointestinal cancers, such as esophageal, gastric, and colon cancer.
“We are truly grateful because, without the support of our donors, we could not have done a lot of our initial experiments,” Thosani says. “What we learned through those studies helped us to design the best treatment for patients like Kim.”
One year after her diagnosis, Kim is cancer-free and once again looking toward the future. She credits her participation in Thosani’s clinical trial with saving her life by shrinking her tumor to a size where it could be safely removed with surgery. After completing a final round of chemotherapy, she is headed to Spain and is grateful for the “all-star team” who helped bring her to this point in her cancer journey.
“Dr. Thosani and his team are the gold standard as far as I’m concerned,” Kim says.